The real wisdom here isn't that suffering teaches us—it's that we can't know while living through it whether a wound will become wisdom or merely scar tissue. Oliver captures something harder than "pain makes us stronger": the uncertainty of transformation itself, the years spent confused and bitter before meaning arrives. When you lose a job or a relationship, you don't get the luxury of knowing whether you're being broken or remade; you only discover that later, if you're lucky enough to look back and see the shape of what you've become. That gap between the darkening and the understanding is where most of us actually live, fumbling toward grace without any guarantee it's waiting.